Growing to $4m+ despite Apple cloning their product - Matt Ronge, Astropad

Matt Ronge is the co-founder and CEO at Astropad, a product that turns your iPad into a second screen both on Windows and Mac, started back in 2015. Back in 2019, their business was almost destroyed when Apple launched a feature that almost made Astropad defunct. What did this lead Matt and his team to do? Pivot and find a new idea? Lay off the team? Absolutely not. They doubled down on their product. Through challenges with big tech, raising kickstarter funding and building physical products, Matt has been on quite the journey with Astropad and we’re going to dive into all of that today, along with a mini-masterclass on PR.What we covered in this episode:Origins of AstropadHaving two technical co-foundersHow they tackled marketing with no prior knowledgeMost useful books to learn the basics22 Immutable Laws of MarketingBurned Out Blogger's Guide to PRHow Matt leveraged PR in the early daysHow indie hackers can use PR for their projectsSize of Astropad in 2022Why they built a hardware productHow to get into building hardwareThe benefits of hardware productsHow Apple stole their productHow they saved their business after being crushed by AppleRecommendationsBook: Radical Candour, The Making of a ManagerPodcast: DitheringIndie Hacker: Monica LentFollow MattTwitterAstropad PodcastFollow MeTwitterIndie Bites TwitterPersonal WebsiteBuy A Wallet2 Hour Podcast CourseSponsor - AhrefsThank you to Ahrefs for sponsoring Indie Bites. Ahrefs is the most complete and valuable SEO tool on the market. Bootstrapped companies such as VEED and Transistor have used Ahrefs extensively to understand how to craft their SEO strategies, which have been such a pivotal part of their growth.If you want to get more traffic from Google on your side-project, I’d recommend first trying out Ahrefs Webmaster Tools for free. You’ll see what keywords your pages are ranking for, understand how Google sees your content and discover what changes you need to improve your search ranking. You should also check out their YouTube channel to understand both the basics of SEO and some more advanced techniques.To try out Ahrefs Webmaster Tools, head to ahrefs.com/awt.